Empire WatchAnalysis of current world affairs with focus on gloabal struggle for social and economic justice and against racism, war, imperialism and oppression much of it brought on by US Empire and its allies

Obama Signs The “Blue Alert System” into Law

While killing of unarmed people of color in the hands of the police continues without an end, averaging about two a day, President Obama on Tuesday signed the “Blue Alert” system, similar to the Amber Alert, to create a nationwide alert system to help capture “anyone who harms a police officer or makes a credible threat to do so”. “It’s important for us to make sure that we do everything we can to help ensure the safety of our police officers when they’re in the line of duty,” Obama said before signing the bill in the Oval Office. Amber Alert has been used to locate abducted children.

Do you know who else President Obama signed a law to protect? Monsanto. He signed H.R. 933, the Monsanto Protection Act, into law, in 2013, over the urgent pleas of more than 250,000 Americans who signed a petition asking him not to sign it.

While he was signing the “Blue Alert” system to “protect” the police, news broke that a pipeline operated by Plains Pipeline, which is part of Plains All American Pipeline corporation, ruptured and spilled up to 105,000 gallons of crude oil in Santa Barbara County and tens of thousands of gallons into the ocean. As reported by Los Angeles Times, the Texas based company, which owns and operates nearly 18,000 miles of pipe networks in several states and reported $43 billion in revenue in 2014 and $878 million in profit, “has accumulated 175 safety and maintenance infractions since 2006, according to federal records”.

Also, as President Obama was getting ready to sign a bill “to protect” police officers, it was reported that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found the chemical company DuPont, which has a $60 billion revenue, responsible for failing to maintain the safety of its workers, which it said led to the death of four workers in November. For that, DuPont was fined $99,000! No, that’s not a mistype. The $60 billion company that caused the death of four workers was fined $99,000.

President Obama, who signs legislation to “ensure the safety” of police officers and Monsanto, doesn’t see a need to protect the lives of workers who are in danger everyday or the environment that gets assaulted and damaged permanently through company greed and criminal negligence. And while no company executive will ever go to jail for causing the death of those workers and while Obama’s Justice Department refused to charge bankers who defrauded borrowers in hundreds of billions of dollars, Chelsea Manning received 35 years in prison for revealing US atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan to the world and 85 year old Sister Megan Rice, 66-year-old Michael Walli, and 59-year-old Greg Boertje-Obed, have been in jail for 3 years for cutting through fences to reach the area of the Y-12 complex where much of the nation’s bomb-grade uranium is stored and hanging anti nuclear weapons banners and spray-painting anti nukes slogans!

Now, not only you will get jail time for revealing government atrocities and protesting against nuclear weapons, but also for “threatening to harm police officers” since of all the different sectors of the population including African American men, workers, the homeless and battered women and national treasures like beaches, oceans and underground waters that are being subjected to pollution, it’s the police officers that need a law to “ensure their safety”!